From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Multiverse of Editing

I've been thinking a lot about editing, mainly because I've been immersed in it myself. It turns out that, astonishingly, most people don't like to edit. Writers I know talk about it as a necessary evil or tedious or painful or all three. Since I told The Three that our next step together was to work through entire pieces—including editing—they've been as silent as me on Twitter.

So why is it that my idea of a perfect day is an intense session of editing, followed by an intense session of rock climbing, capped off by an intense session of taco-eating? (Hey, I just described yesterday! Sometimes life really rocks.)

I considered that it might be my German blood enjoying bringing order to whatever craziness my Celtic blood poured all over the page—and there's probably something to that. But what it really is, I think, is the way that I started writing in the first place, writing the same characters over and over in different stories. Sometimes the characters didn't change much from story to story; sometimes a story needed them to be slightly different people; sometimes they had to be very different people.

Nine out of 10 adorable baby turtles prefer left-handers.

There's this theory in physics called the multiverse, which is the idea that there are an infinite number of universes (universi?) out there, so there are an infinite number of variations of all possible realities. In one reality, humans might not exist at all; in another, things might be exactly like they are in our universe, except that I'm right-handed instead of left-handed. (We don't like that universe.)

We only see the universe we live in; we can only deal with the reality we have right now. But characters don't have just the one life like we do; characters live in the multiverse. There's an infinite number of lives they could lead, an infinite number of variations—big or small—that affect the stories we tell about them. One life could be almost indistinguishable from another or seem absolutely unrelated.

(I say seem because there's of course always the heart, the essence of the character, and that doesn't change, regardless of which story you tell about them.)

There are those times when the story you drafted is just a starting point, when you have to throw out the middle or the end (or even the beginning). When it turns out that the journey you wrote first was really just to lead you to the journey you really need to write. It can be sad to lose paragraphs or scenes or entire groups of characters, but every time you make a change, you're just opening up another universe, another set of possibilities.

In the universe of this galaxy, the barista who makes
my flat white looks just like Hugh Jackman.

In the physics multiverse, there is no one right universe, but in the writing multiverse we eventually edit our way to a right universe.

Maybe this seems esoteric, but all this is just another way of saying: Let your characters breathe. Let them explore. Don't let them get stuck in your first vision. Think about all the decisions you've made in your life and the places you might have gone (good and bad) if you had taken a different path at any of those moments. Your characters can do that—and you don't lose anything: All the other possibilities are still out there.

That's why I love editing. There's so much possibility, so much demand for creative thinking, for following the thread of a change and seeing where it takes you. If you're standing there with Robert Frost at the two roads diverging in the wood, you only get to pick one. Your characters can go anywhere.